Explain cleaving a shared health pool

[ThePants999]

Health sharing is done differently in several games, as previous stated by other posts than mine, and the way it's done in WoW is not exactly user friends. No one would think that their dmg is sent to an invisible combined health bar and then redivided among all the linked enemies. It's a lot more logical to see your dmg reduced to what this enemy takes directly and see other numbers pop on other linked enemies, like in D3.

I don't understand what's unintuitive here. I hit a mob for 1M. The health bar above his head goes down by 1M. What's so illogical about that?

It sounds like you want my 1M hit to be reduced to 500K (assuming two linked mobs), but then also pop up as 500K on the other mob. That seems far more illogical to me - my attack does 1M damage, unless I'm hitting a linked mob, in which case it's reduced (but, by the way, copied to the others).

The combined health bar is not invisible. It's above every linked mob. There is no combining and redividing. Every point of damage you do is a point off the shared health bar.

Cleaving is the only time it gets weird, when I hit both mobs for 1M each, but then 2M is taken off both their bars - I can see how that might look like you did 4M damage. But the key thing to realise is that each mob doesn't HAVE his own health. That's why there's no "redividing" going on, there's nothing to divide between. There's only one health bar, the game just shows it to you multiple times

[Holofernes]

I don't understand what's unintuitive here. I hit a mob for 1M. The health bar above his head goes down by 1M. What's so illogical about that?

It sounds like you want my 1M hit to be reduced to 500K (assuming two linked mobs), but then also pop up as 500K on the other mob. That seems far more illogical to me - my attack does 1M damage, unless I'm hitting a linked mob, in which case it's reduced (but, by the way, copied to the others).

The combined health bar is not invisible. It's above every linked mob. There is no combining and redividing. Every point of damage you do is a point off the shared health bar.

Cleaving is the only time it gets weird, when I hit both mobs for 1M each, but then 2M is taken off both their bars - I can see how that might look like you did 4M damage. But the key thing to realise is that each mob doesn't HAVE his own health. That's why there's no "redividing" going on, there's nothing to divide between. There's only one health bar, the game just shows it to you multiple times

thats actually not how it works in wow. The technology how this is handled in wow works like spiritlink in shamans.

every mob is its unit (and therefor has its own hp bar). now in council fights, several mobs have hp bars that are linked to each other, and health is redistributed every few millisecond via a call function secondarily. Its not like one bar split between several objects, its several objects that are secondarily linked together, from the game coding perspective.

The call funtion get health_ update was slower in the older iterations of wow, so in tbc / wotlk u would notice on councilfights often that there was a slight delay from getting the pool to 0 to all mobs actually dying (gruuls lair first encounter was a perfect example for this). From this behaviour you could see how council fights are calculated internally. In modern wow, this delay is unnoticable, because the update frequency for the hp link variable got higher.

[ThePants999]

Sure, but how it's handled under the covers doesn't really matter. It's how it works from the player's perspective that matters.

[osa]

From player perspective you damage only those mobs you are actually hitting for your singletarget/aoe(per target) amount.

[Deleted]

How are you still talking about this? Do we really need 40 explanations? How it is handled behind the scenes is irrelevant to the OP his question, and whether how it's technically set up is user friendly or not: who gives a shit?

[Nize]

I don't know why they didn't do it like in D3, it's a lot more logical. Sharing dmg should logically means that the numbers you normally do is split between the targets, therefore seeing smaller numbers, like in D3.
So in WoW you do 5000 (visible floating dmg number) to your target but his HP is reduced by 1666? Or you actually do 5000 to ONE GUY but the other 2 that you DID NOT HIT and on which you see NO DMG NUMBER also lose 5000 magically?

I understand what you mean, but in the end that just means WoW is made like shit. If I see 5000 on ONE guy his hp and NO ONE ELSE'S should go down by 5000, regardless of any other conditions.

You're confusing shared damage with shared health. OP was talking about shared health. WoW does have shared damage abilities (such as Fire Mage talent "Meteor"), but it's rare and noted within the ability.